Possible new project: OpenJDK LaF

[Mario Torre]

Hi all,

First of all, sorry for cross posting... I would like to kindly ask to
direct all the replies to this thread to the "discuss" alias if
possible.

Is a bit of time I'm playing with the idea of implementing a proper GTK3
look and feel for OpenJDK, something to make the jdk look a bit more
modern and also take it as an opportunity to solve some of the issues
the GTK2 laf has, including some related bugs like this:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=729

I mentored a Summer of Code project last year where we produced a more
or less working and complete implementation. It was a student project
and the efforts to make it well abstracted and tested are really as
close as making a new implementation, however it was great to show that
we could have a basic and functional implementation in less than a month
of work, the new GTK3 library looks way nicer!

At the same time, since Swing will be [very] gradually replaced by
JavaFX, I think it would be awesome to have a JavaFX based look and
feel, something I started to play with last year as well but then put on
hold because of tons of other things to do:

https://neugens.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/javafx-look-and-feel-for-swing/

Recently I was convinced though that we should move forward with the
Java laf: Swing has still lots to say, and JavaFX is not yet as
integrated with OpenJDK as it should be (especially in Linux
distribution, although is more popular within the OSX and Windows
communities), but before I move forward (and get to propose a JEP for
this) I would like some early feedback and gather some ideas/potential
interest :)

Another possible implementation would be based on QT, which is even
cross platform by itself.

So to recap, what are your feelings about an official OpenJDK look and
feel collection?

Cheers,
Mario